1) Do no unnecessary harm.2) Do not presume.3) Do not compare experience.

The world doesn’t need changing. We do. Read on and live the three ethics and be changed.

​Do no unnecessary harmWe can’t live without harming someone or something. Though we can completely avoid doing unnecessary harm. This requires that we are intelligent and compassionately Aware in our state of being, that we embody our power while being gracious in the face of another’s. One requisite for this is being centered and grounded in our body—in the moment—here and now.

We need to be connected with and informed by the non-ordinary forces of the Mystery which guide our choosing and our decision taking—rather than making choices from our emotions and understandings.(The “how” of doing these things is another conversation.)

Do not presumeNearly all or our difficulties are brought on by ourselves—save for being caught and injured in natural disasters or political or environmental calamities for example. Thinking we know is problematic: thinking we know more, or better, or what’s up when we are actually caught up in the folly of the fables we’ve told ourselves. This is the status quo for most of us. Everything we think we know is story—made up or adopted. Over the years my teacher, Paul Richards, passed these ethics to others and myself—without saying more than identifying them. Me passing them to you is an example of presuming—thinking I know.

Ethics are a model to guide us. The wonderful thing about a model is that we have a model. The problem with a model is that we have a model (limiting our creativity).

Do not compare experienceShe’s doing better than me. I’m envious of so and so. I wish I had his job. She’s prettier. He is respected more than me. So and so has been published. I haven’t. I’m the better parent. At least I’m not a drunk. My life isn’t as difficult as his.

Blah. Blah. Blah.

•Psychological experiencePsychologists say “experience is what we do with what happens to us”. They’re correct if we limit the use of the word to mean psychological experience—thoughts and understanding—which is, by the way, a consequence of transforming direct sensory and extra-sensory experience into language and thought.

We are sentient: We see, hear, feel, taste and smell things directly—before and without involving thought.

Again, there is more!

• Direct non-ordinary experienceWe possess, distinct from our five senses, an array of perceptual faculties through which we experience the non-ordinary realities suffusing our lives. Generally girls and women are best at this, particularly when they keep them active—something patriarchy eschews. Too, there are sensitive boys and men in the world who perceive the non-ordinary.

“I awoke knowing I’d been selected for the promotion.” “Out of the blue I knew something tragic had happened to so and so.” “I saw her across the campus quadrangle for the first time and knew we would marry.” “The phone rang and I knew it was her.”“Suddenly I knew what I had to do…”“The solution came to me in the shower.”

Comparing experience is a thought-based-psychological undertaking. It’s predicated on values and beliefs which are themselves constructions of our own, or another’s. They are not real. In the right context they are useful. Others, not so much as they destabilize ourselves and others, impede intimacy, our connection to our creativity, to the Mystery.

1) Do no unnecessary harm.2) Do not presume.3) Do not compare experience.

The world doesn’t need changing. We do. Live the three ethics and be changed.

“Poems are rough notations for the music we are.” — Rumi (Coleman Barks translation)

Rumi’s acumen in perceiving people as music is not such a stretch given that science describes reality in terms of frequencies—waves of matter, sound, light, electromagnetism and so on. So our suspicions of not being who or what we’ve thought ourselves to be may be spot on. No wonder when left to their own devices children dance—do they still hear and feel their music?

Rumi also said there is an Awareness present in everyone that existed before the Universe itself existed; and it, and ourselves, came out of that Awareness. Not the other way round. Hmm? What if this Awareness is but a single notation? and what if this single notation is an original score? and what if this original score is a love song? and what if this love song—when audible and palpable in our lives counterbalances the juggernaut of disharmony in our world?

Musing further, I love the French concept of étude. It means a study in an instrumental musical composition, which is usually short, of considerable difficulty, and the étude is designed to provide practice material for perfecting a particular musical skill. Are we not composing our lives? Do we not by late mid-life appreciate life’s short duration? Do we not experience considerable difficulty in effecting our desires to help others? to be genuine in ourselves? and in our expression and movement?

So what specifically is our study?—our étude? What is the particular skill we’re here to perfect? It is to live in ways in which our thought and action reveal the luminosity and numinous beauty of the single notation of the extant Awareness within us? This Awareness, the one Rumi reminds us of—the one seemingly oblivious to us—the one that is The original score, it is—I contend, a love song.

Isn’t it odd though that such a love song—our love song—the what and who that we essentially are—is largely obscured and drowned out by our upbringing and the cacophonies of our time? I submit to you that it need not.

Let the beauty of the love song that we are move and resound and refract through the instrumentality of our thought and action. What practice need we undertake to develop this skill? Placing the self first in our lives and do so unselfishly. Honoring the integrity and dignity of the original score and the love song that we are. Doing this by placing ourselves at the front of queue. The top of the list. Making ourselves and meeting our needs priority one without entitlement or arrogance. Without injuring or shorting others. Without cruelty or diminishment.

What blasphemy am I suggesting? Is your psyche rebelling? If so, consider the resistance a measure of the mettle of our indoctrination, the rigor and strength of pressures to conform and domesticate and diminish ourselves—even though doing so occurs at our expense.

Placing ourselves first in our life is The prerequisite to fulfilling the promises of our life. It is: 1) Recognizing the imperative to graciously live interdependently in cooperative and creative collaboration. 2) Loving, valuing, supporting and making place for the feminine and her voice, standing, methods and motion. 3) To genuinely be ourselves living in our own way—which means: a) actually and genuinely helping others while caring for ourselves equivalently; b) opening to and participating in the Mystery Herself, the realities suffusing us all—not through belief or contemplation—but rather, through movement in Her realms, and being changed by these experiences; and by c) making our lives themselves—and our unique creative expression—impeccable works of art.

We will not and cannot fulfill the promise of our lives without placing ourselves first! We will not be first among equals. Remember: No one is equal to another. There are always those more powerful and those less. We can, however, be equally gracious in our differences. We can live and work interdependently. And cooperatively. And collaboratively. But can only do so by placing ourselves first in our lives and doing so unselfishly. Putting oneself first is The Study in Grace—Our étude.

Look around: independent selfish agency and agenda prevail in the world. It is increasing at an increasing rate.

Bringing our love song to the fore can counterbalance the selfishness that is imperiling us all. The more of us doing so, the sooner the tipping point. The sooner global change. Whether we do this timely enough I don’t know. It’s worth doing so irrespective.

Lastly, remember please that the now canonized never-take-no-for-an-answer Mother Teresa did everything she did for herself. She knew the power of placing herself first. She knew the benefits to self and others of doing so.

Mahatma Gandhi: “Whatever you do in life will be insignificant but it’s very important that you do it.”

A year ago this month my elderly father took his life ostensibly without letting others know what’s up. Yet, the morning my brother told me, I realized that my dad had been telling me as much for the last two months during our frequent phone calls. He told me not in words of course, but in the spaces in between. In his non-ordinary messages—those things communicated without words or para-verbals or physical analogue. He told me in energy. Women know about such communications more often than men. Nonetheless he’d been telling me and I remained oblivious.

He’d taken as much as he could stand. His death, and its cause, prompted (as soon as I hung up the phone) an immediate and involuntary response where my body dropped to the couch in loud explosive paroxysms of sobbing that were all too brief. Regrettably, my expression was interrupted and I couldn’t recapture it for six months. In the interim, my body expressed its sadness and grief and anger with four months of bronchitis. What needs moving finds its way irrespective.

The thing is, when grief rises, it all comes. All of them. The ones I’d long forgotten, and the existential ones—those I didn’t know I had. Along with these were angers and rages issuing from early childhood development breaches and ouches lying unexpressed beneath the compost of familial and cultural mores and other restrictions on my nature. This year I had the good fortune of having a good guide and workable maps to navigate the terrain of moving my emotions. To say the year has been difficult is an understatement. Though I talked about my dad with one of my brothers, and my sister and mom a day or two before the anniversary of Dad’s death, the anniversary itself passed unnoticed. I’m not yet through my many griefs and angers but this year, for the first time it seems, the gift my dad gave me in his death has enabled me to get to the bottom of things I’ve wanted to remedy for a long time. He hadn’t seen or met me in his life. He never knew me. He saw instead what he projected. A pandemic circumstance I think. One worthy of our healing efforts.

I was prompted by a dream in July to go to the Alvord Desert in Eastern Oregon. I went there by myself for four days in August. People who know me know that I’ve a mystical thing going on and have non-ordinary experiences, and use non-ordinary forces in my work. Suffice it to say that in the desert I had a significant intellectually indefensible experience culminating in an integration and a reorganization of whatever I am, for which I am wholly grateful. I’ve been utterly changed, and so too has my work.

Before leaving to work in Taiwan this fall I felt I needed to go to Kaohsiung in the south of the country, a port-of-call during the Vietnam War. Though the city’s skyline was unrecognizable, the mountain scape was. Attempting to put words to my experience this time round seems something I’m incapable of doing: all I think I know is that something moved and began finding its way back to me. Equally unexpected, the next day I had lunch with a Vietnamese woman and we talked of the war. I had no awareness that I had felt so betrayed in my involvement in that “Police action” as history euphemistically regards it. My dad had been in WW11. My grandfather in WW1. Something moved for each of us this autumn and I am grateful for the changes.

As to the healing power of illness, well, my wife’s recent foray into chemo infusions remains quite a teacher. Lesson one: don’t carry what is not mine. Two: stay centered and grounded here and now. Three: sensibly manage where I put my focus and attention. Four: Keep love in the foreground.

“Whether all is really lost or not depends entirely on whether or not I am lost.” — Vaclav Havel

I wonder: Is the USA's president hell-bent on acting out racist, sexist, homophobic, misogynistic, elitist and supremacy beliefs? Is there an intent and design to his pattern of derision, divisiveness and exclusionary rhetoric?Do we possess the means to deflect the echo of his skillful usage of disinformation?Do his actions epitomize the worst aspects of patriarchy? of humanity?Are his actions the problem or symptomatic of those things each of us have yet to reconcile within ourselves?

The tyranny of patriarchy is the long standing distinctive patten of humanity. Patriarchy is our dominant social operating system. Racism, sexism, homophobia, elitism, derision, divisiveness, exclusion and supremacy are—regrettably—humanity’s signature. Its dominant articulation and expression.

I wonder: Are not the tenets of patriarchy our own un- and witting individual expressions? Mine? Yours? Do we flinch at this thought—yet pretend it is not? Is our pretense an obstacle? One perpetuating our denial? Does our pretending continue our individual indecency? …that of others?Does pretending prevent us from opening to and developing our capacities to Love?

I wonder:​Do we not conform to patterns of we and they—us and them?Are we each not patriarchy’s signatories?Do we not speak of patriarchy when referring to those out there to distance ourselves from our own equivalent actions?Do we really think the monsters are only out there?

Humanity has long traversed a course antithetical to Love. Is it so that no one advances spiritually until the whole advances?

I wonder:Since we as individuals each live out The Hero’s Journey—the story where we must survive or die from a significant ordeal—be utterly tested and changed by it—must we, collectively, do the same?Are we? Has the USA now entered this ordeal? What will be the impact on our world?

Though our ancestors reside in other precincts, were they to tell us things—they’d commend that we Choose Love in our lifetime. They’d acknowledge that they themselves had not. They’d acknowledge their witting and unwitting complicity in the plight of humanity. They’d say that were we to act with graciousness, generosity, kindness and compassion—were we to act inclusively without capitulation—particularly with those whose thinking opposes our own—we would experience more ease and beauty and joy—irrespective of the degree of our difficulty in our lives. They’d say humanity’s distinctive pattern would shift away from patriarchy—from our unloving routines. This is Choosing Love, they’d say.

I wonder:Though unaware, do we not each deny our capacities to Choose Love?Do we realize that our failing to Choose Love has rendered us lost?Though unaware, do we each refuse Love?Do we not say “No” to Life? to Love daily? Albeit unawares…

I wonder:Do epochs of thought and action cycle in and out of favor?Have we not transitioned into a different one now?What type of epoch will we make it?​My next post will address pushback: resistance and counterbalancing forces, and other such imperatives.

I just watched Good Girls Revolt, a fictionalized TV account of the discriminatory practices that prompted women employees to sue Newsweek in 1970. Women were denied opportunities to write, or if they wrote a piece for the man they provided research for, the women did not get the byline. They were paid one-third the salaries of men while being expected to enthusiastically and submissively support the functions held by men—whether they themselves were more highly educated or capable. The series revealed the many ways in which women were—and remain—treated less well well than men.

On March 22, 1972, the US Senate passed the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution banning discrimination based on sex. The States had seven years to ratify. Subsequently they were given a three-year extension. The Amendment was never ratified leaving half of us bereft of anti-discriminatory constitutional support. How ironic that constitutionally unprotected US women soldiers now serve in combat.

Nation states have their own security as their primary objective—not that of their population. State security is paramount as their charge is the interests of a particular minority—nothing more. States must remain capable to that end. As with traversing any course, there are degrees of deviation en route an objective. The 1960s and early 70s were a period of deviation—expanding benefits for the population. We exhaled a bit.

Since then though, The particular minority has been gradually taking back what they gave—and more—leaving many of us to hold our breath. A cycle of still tighter contraction is returning. Although an over simplification, high pressure always flows into low pressure. We live in a force/countervailing force Cosmos.

Irrespective of the degree of insolent or violent thought and action perpetrated on women—regardless of what’s being denied them—despite prevailing circumstances of oblique and undisguised systemic cavalier, dismissive and reckless disregard for girls and women—and the Feminine—the dignity, innocence and beauty of girls and women can never be sullied, impeached, abridged or expunged. I see this being true for boys and men too. I won’t go there now as we’re not at that point in our conversation.

Human decency—love and compassion, graciousness and generosity, kindness and respect, dignity, innocence and beauty—and the granting of standing, voice, and power to women—are not the province of the state, religion, politics or the law. This purview is ours alone! This responsibility is our individual sovereign duty! Quoting the comedian Amy Schumer “You will not define my story. I will!”

No one is a victim here. Patriarchy is equally dangerous to men albeit less obvious. Patriarchy has crippled humanity, retarded our growth, and is killing off possibilities to sustain life on our planet. By each of us having internalized patriarchal ethics we’ve created unnecessary divisions within ourselves, and between one another. Whether aware or not, we each are conflicted inside as societal ethics collide with our deeper Wisdom. It is within our capacities to wholly transform ourselves and change—for our betterment—from the seemingly perilous circumstances of our times—the larger system’s actions notwithstanding.

It’s not about “them” out there! Nor about what “they” are doing! It’s about us—ourselves. It’s about our own self-reckoning. Our accountability to our own sovereignty. It is our own responsibility to heal, grow, change and become the Beings and Forces that we genuinely are. Not to be at odds with “them”. But rather, to leave behind the invectives of others. To define our own stories. To celebrate and support our self-confidence and that of those around us. To identify and develop the capacities to give what we are here to give—then to give them. Not only for ourselves, but for those generations in the future.

Paraphrasing a master teacher of mine …a woman would be better off alone and starving in the desert than to remain in abusive circumstances… He is referring to the damage done primarily to the soul of a woman—the energetic aspects of her, distinct and beyond her psychologically, physically. This is equally true for men.

​I know and feel the heartbreak with every woman I coach. I see consequences of patriarchy in the men I work with too. I see its adverse effects in my mother, sister and the women I know or meet. And, I know this most intimately in my wife who survived my processes of awakening and maturation.

Here is a verse from William Stafford’s “A Ritual to Read to Each Other” //For it is important that awake people be awake/or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep/ the signals we give--yes or no, or maybe—/should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

“Who are the people, ideas, and books that magnify your spirit? Find them, hold on to them, and visit them often. Use them not only as a remedy once spiritual malaise has already infected your vitality but as a vaccine administered while you are healthy to protect your radiance.” - Maria Popova --www.brainpickings.org

Maria’s words “…protecting your radiance” means standing strong in your pursuit of answering the two most fundamental questions of our lives: • Who am I really? • What do I have to give the world?

These two questions lead us toward our promise: The promise of genuinely being ourselves; and the promise of utterly and completely expressing ourselves—in our existence, and in the giving of our unique talent—that, by its very nature—benefits self, others and the whole. Our desire to help, to contribute, is hardwired.

Caveat emptor! Pursuing these questions adds levels of complexity to our lives. Our cultures support and expect conformity not individuality. Our cultures shunt our energies to others’ ends and not to our uniqueness nor its attendant and awaiting expression. Whether seeking, finding and expressing our gifts, or in living lives of conformity, we encounter unpredictable pressure waves in our daily lives. Yet, I offer another spoiler alert: The alternative to pursuing our own life has costs too: we live lives fraught with the vicissitudes of confounding feelings of being unexpressed accompanied by an incessant and illusive sense of emptiness.

In the greater scheme of Life, one way of living is no better than another. Yet, each path renders consequences. One is a path of Wisdom. One is not. One is expansive. One contracts. Looking at our wold today through these lenses, we see the effects of the paths of the majority.

Being genuinely ourselves and expressing our unique talent fills us. Makes us more. We become whole. In this we are changed. In expressing the radiance of being ourselves expressing our gifts, others are changed. Yet too, we do not find ourselves nor give our gifts to change others. Rather, we become and express of out of the necessity of our soul. Anything less lends toward folly.

The word pentimento is, in part, a lovely word. It means a visible trace of earlier painting beneath a layer or layers of paint on a canvas. There are traces of earlier painting on the canvas of each of us. These traces are our ineffable Self. Our radiance. And, they are the paintings of our attendant and unique gift or talent--these brushstrokes issue from the Mystery’s palette. This is what we are to find with our questions of Who am I really? and What do I have to give the world?

Our pentimento is almost entirely concealed beneath the pigments of our ancestry, families of origin, and the cultural mores of our upbringing, education and training—the forces of our conformity. Culture renders our lives less vivid and less vital. Culture moves us away from ourselves and our great gifts. This is paradoxically necessary while simultaneously perilous. It is from this precarious layer we begin our search.

The not so lovely aspects of the word pentimento lie in its root: repentant. Little wonder so many of us apologize for who or how we are. Little wonder we often find it impractical to roll the rock of our becoming up the steep hills of our culture. Conforming seems easier.

Yet the Mystery orchestrates the placement of people and ideas and books on our path that, by virtue of their presence, rouse our awakening. Our remembering. They stir our self-discovery and becoming. Their visitations are vitally important. So too, there are people in our lives who see the loveliness of our pentimento when we ourselves have yet to find them. These people remind us apologies are devices of the culture and are ill-suited for us. They invite us to seek out who we are and our gift to give.

Yet, this discovery is, of necessity, our own undertaking. At times we require the assistance of others and we need ask for it. Help clearing impediments to our path. Too, they expand our awareness. Once we’ve sensed our gift, many of us must develop its expression through self-disciplinary arts that change us yet again in its process.

And you? Who are those people? those ideas? those books that rouse your radiance? Is it time to revisit them? Are you asking the fundamental questions of Who am I really? What am I here to give the world?

I’ve had a yellow rose bush in a terra cotta pot for maybe twenty-five years. I’ve dragged it from house to house. Two years ago I planted it near my front porch trimming it back severely. Last year its stems barely grew. I wondered whether the paltriness of its leaves could gather light or store sustaining sugars. I thought I killed it. Nonetheless, in the fall I cut it back but less harshly.

This spring it leafed out fully on long thorny stems—though thinner than those of its past. Returning home after work travel, it was awash with small deeply red roses. The bush had always borne yellow roses. The tiny red ones were gorgeous in a natural way—though quite unlike the corollas of its former domesticated self. I looked across the commons area into my neighbor’s yard: It was bursting with a plethora of large beautiful colorful roses—ones most of us have been taught to appreciate.

​I had killed my rose alright. Well, rather, I killed its domesticated yellow cultivated parts. Those bits long ago grafted onto a wild and natural red rose rootstock—in whose beauty I now reveled. The next morning my roses were gone. Deer got them, and they’ve dined on buds all summer. It’s late summer as I write this and autumn is in the air. As I look out my window, I see a wholly natural rose bearing long thorny stems and lots of leaves. Next year I’ll keep the deer away: I want this rose's undomesticated beauty.

For years I stewarded my life as I had the rose being equally harsh with myself. I didn’t know this though, and am I’m only now getting it. Domestication is so opaque—so hard to see through.Don’t get me wrong, I’ve longed and worked assiduously to free my incarcerated self from the falsity and folly of domestication—though all the while being my own worst enemy. I'm changed and changing. I’m grateful. Something of wildness is flowering within.

Let’s toast to the growing and developing sufficiently to keep the ego in its proper place—that of serving our Essential rootstock.

Poet David Whyte said that when he had a son, he felt the need to teach him. His sense was organic—an instinct to continue the species. We know instincts through drives, feelings, emotions and protective urges—those prompting us to care for and train younger ones, and our urges to flinch, freeze, fight or take flight.

When his daughter arrived Whyte said that he sensed a need to apprentice himself to her. His sense of apprenticing to the Feminine of his daughter arose not from animal, ancestral, familial or cultural inheritance—but rather, from the non-ordinary forces of the Mystery. Whether we have daughters or not, all of us—girls, boys, women and men—are constantly being invited, by the Mystery, to apprentice ourselves to the Feminine. She is Life!

The Mystery’s forces and their invitations routinely go unrecognized/unheard. When heard, routinely unheeded. The forces of the Mystery are of a different order than our instincts. These forces are doing the Mystery’s bidding. They are inorganic. Non-instinctual. They derive from, and remain something other than physical matter, thoughts, or imaginings. Our upbringings teach us to disavow their messages when they penetrate our denial, surfacing in awareness.

Her bidding? Become Her Consort. Her Lover. Her co-creative collaborator—all the while growing into the sovereign forces that we ourselves are. Her bidding? Participate in the Whole of things… going to places beyond what our cultures and its institutions acknowledge.

When I was nine my brothers and I got a sister. I was ecstatic. However these things work, she and I have an uncommon connection. We SEE each other. I didn’t know then that I was unfathomably in love with the Feminine. I still am.

The Cosmos… the Universe… the Mystery… all are feminine. Our world—our planet, and Nature—the natural environment—are feminine. All of it is, save for periodic impulses of the Masculine. The Source… the Divine… Allness… the central organizing force of the Cosmos… these words point to the same phenomenon, which is feminine.

Unawares, the human race has disenfranchised itself from the vital-peaceful-aliveness, the undomesticated motion and co-creative promise of our existences. We’ve done so by living out millennia upon millennia of patriarchal mores and acting in accord with its insipid best-practices. We, ourselves, today, continue this folly, equally oblivious, though we consider ourselves aware…

Gender essence possess charge. These forces, and their charge, have been wholly and profanely misunderstood and acted on. The charge between the sexes has been corrupted and contaminated culminating in unspeakable violence. The Feminine and the Masculine gender essence forces are something other than what we’ve been brought up to believe or imagine.

I contend that we—all of us—are profoundly, staggeringly, breathlessly and ecstatically in love with the Feminine, though we are wholly unaware of this, and callous in our ignorance. If we want to leverage change, we will be well served to bring this love into our conscious awareness; to say “Yes!” to it, and act in accord with the our love of the Feminine. Doing so will render boon upon boon to ourselves and others.

What will you do? How will you be? as you awaken to the actuality that you cannot not love the Feminine? That you cannot actually hate life and the living…That you are instead wholly and completely and ecstatically in love with Life, the Cosmos, others, yourself—the Feminine?

“…systems break because they are rigid and unbending. If we spend our lives trying to adjust to something broken we break ourselves in the process…”~ Shane Koyczan

There is something to the Buddhists’ worldview regarding the immeasurable privilege of being incarnated human. The breathtaking number of life forms on the planet alone—options in which we could be playing out our lives—render the odds of being human infinitesimal. This says nothing of sperm ovum failures nor the myriad other existences we could inhabit in other worlds.

Privilege does not mean human life is more important or more valuable or more significant than other life forms—but rather—different: The Beings we are, are privileged to access a greater range and type of motion than others…privileged to join and connect and move with one another with greater nuance, and to engage more complimentarily… privileged to experience and express endless possibilities of creativity…privileged, too, in our particular form of sentience and capacities for experience, and all that this renders…

Whether we believe or not, to presuppose privilege garners us boon upon boon. Assuming privilege now, irrespective of circumstance, revises the overarching stories of our lives by providing non-ordinary color, syntax and meter which changes us and our lives lending greater ease in an uneasy world.

Whether done with Grace or done inelegantly, people are staggeringly adaptive. Adapting is required to navigate the day to day. Yet, we are no more open, agile, flexible or creative in our adaptations than our personal and cultural stories allow.

Inasmuch, there is yet another privilege: That of being autonomous, sovereign, unique. Though our individual and cultural stories eschew our sovereignty… Nonetheless, and paradoxically, we cannot genuinely join others without claiming and inhabiting our autonomy—being our own selves. And this, we can’t do until we acknowledge the privilege of our humanity, itself… Hmm?

But wait there is more: The sovereign ones that we are are being urged by the Mystery to creatively express what is uniquely ours to render… This, too, requires acknowledgement of human privilege…of sovereignty…of the necessity to connect with others and forces beyond ourselves…

What’s really going on is a, a recursive process requiring new iterations from us in each spiraling arc…

And you thought it was easy being a person…

For me personally, my practice is graciousness without being polite. Gracious in saying Yes! to the promise of the privileges of being human. For me, it involves disciplining myself to be here and now in my body. Keeping my attention on what I love, and connecting with the Intents of the Mystery.

“…bent on building an ennobled world of dignity for all…”- Maria Popova

In 2010 the Dalia Lama proclaimed “The world will be saved by [the] Western woman.”

Recently the Pope declared 22 June as Mary Magdalene Feast Day.

The International Council of 13 Indigenous Grandmothers gave the world this message:

"As you move through these changing times... be easy on yourself and be easy on one another. You are at the beginning of something new. You are learning a new way of being. You will find that you are working less in the yang modes that you are used to. You will stop working so hard at getting from point A to point B the way you have in the past, but instead, will spend more time experiencing yourself in the whole, and your place in it. Instead of traveling to a goal out there, you will voyage deeper into yourself. Your mother's grandmother knew how to do this. Your ancestors from long ago knew how to do this. They knew the power of the feminine principle... and because you carry their DNA in your body, this wisdom and this way of being is within you. Call on it. Call it up. Invite your ancestors in. As the yang based habits and the decaying institutions on our planet begin to crumble, look up. A breeze is stirring. Feel the sun on your wings."

In 1988, though not original to her, the former USA State of Texas Governor Ann W. Richards said “If you give us the chance, we can perform. After all, Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and in high heels."

Irrespective of how the subordination of girls and women and the disparaging of all that is feminine became the norm… No matter that our doing so is inexcusable and unjustifiable… No matter that all of us—girls and women and boys and men—are conditioned to debase more than half of the people on the planet because of their sex… In the name of human decency… In the name of dignity…. In the name of Love…

Personally, as an activist of the human heart… of decency, with a bent toward that which is just… We must now direct our attentions and resources to counterbalance the forces diminishing the Feminine. We must do so with our unequivocal action in support of women’s power, place, standing, voice and contribution—to feminine wisdom and process. We must do so while maintaining the dignity of boys and men and the Masculine. We must take a stand within ourselves to think and act differently within ourselves… With one another.

We are in the midst of a transition of epochs: we are leaving the patriarchal and moving into an honoring of the Feminine… an honoring of girls and women… Though the path ahead is arduous, we must now construct the circumstances for furthering—for enabling—cooperative and collaborative partnerships of Feminine and Masculine… of women and men. This will take generations to realize of course, yet we must do our part now to enable succeeding generations to do theirs.

In these actions we will heal ourselves, one another—and avail ourselves to see into and work hand in hand with the otherwise ‘unseen’ Universal forces of Wisdom—we will see into the forces of the Mystery beyond mind/imagination, body and matter.

Were we to look into the eyes of the 13 Grandmothers we’d see there is no New Age dribble expressed here, but rather, ancient Wisdom from our future…

A couple years ago I discovered YouTube’s Britain’s Got Talent. When I have time I watch and listen while making breakfast or coffee. In sharing their talent, those auditioning reveal their beauty and at times, I cry. The poet John O’Donohue said the human heart cannot live without beauty.

Before YouTube, I read Nobel Laureate acceptance speeches looking for beauty. I also read things like the inaugural speech of the Czech Republic’s first president, Vaclav Havel. His honesty revealed his beauty. Though I sometimes grouse about the stupid things people do, I know of and see humanity’s staggering beauty. I always find it. For me, it’s important to direct my attention to beauty as doing so makes it easier to maintain clarity and resourcefulness—particularly in difficult times.

For the past two or three years I’ve been reading interviews of writers and writers writing about writing. The Fragrance of Guava: Conversations with Gabriel Garcia Marquez is lovely. Garcia Marquez said “I know my wife so well that I don’t know her at all.” In seeing his wife, he saw the Mystery in her. Now that’s beauty!

Not knowing how to love is what prevents us from seeing one another. What was it Thich Nhat Hahn said? “To love without knowing how to love wounds the person we love.” This has been my experience—from both sides—the one ostensibly being loved and the one ostensibly doing the loving.

Its taken me so long to learn to love. So long to leave a child’s way of loving. I could lament this but don’t. Rather, I’m gratefully and utterly gobsmacked with my new capacity and experience of loving in a mature way, of experiencing the heart-touching and arresting force, or whatever it is, in and beyond my wife—that ever present ineffable something that I’d been oblivious to, yet, so desperately seeking. Phew!

This ineffable force is, of course, its own thing—yet, too, it infuses everything. To know this now is beyond my ability to express. Though books and film opened me, it is through another that the Mystery bequeathed me this boon.

Even so, I yet have impediments to the freedom that will ensue from loving myself more fully—from uttering my unequivocal “Yes” to the Mystery. It seems that I’ve had aspects bent on defining myself by others’ and my own ill-fitting invectives…

…rather than by the best of me. Hmm?

As for tears in my appreciation of others’ creative expression… Well, yes, there is an honesty in those tears; yet, too, my story and tears have also been a ruse. One that fooled me a long time. Recently, my story shattered: I now see that my tears were me feeling sorry for myself—for not yet having creatively expressed what I long to.

I either get my, now-shattered, limiting story… or I can do what it takes to do the things I say I want to do…

​Biologists tell us there are seven signs of life: moving, respiration, sensitivity, growth, reproduction, excretion and nutrition. Mystic Paul Richards suggests differently. Life is creativity, he says. No creativity—no life. There are gradations of life: more creativity—more life. He’s onto something more significant than we are wont to appreciate.

I’m not suggesting everyone sculpt, cook gourmet foods or write poetry but rather that we open ourselves to relationships with the Mystery’s muse forces beyond mind, body and imagination. In doing so our lives open to the Mystery’s Enchantment and our actions—from the nuanced to the overt—radiate something transcendent.

Life itself is Enchantment. It can’t be measured or sussed out rationally. It is instead experienced directly. Most of us deny Enchantment’s existence as we rarely allow ourselves to fully and directly experience our lives via our senses. Enchantment is not eschewing us nor does She limit Her visitations. Rather, it is our own unwitting bent on over-thinking our lives that precludes Her touch. Our penchant for thought is a form of collateral damage. A consequence of our personal histories. This can be changed. We can come to our senses.

I’m no one to talk. I jumped from the ship of my body as a child and roamed the ethers. Seemed more pleasant than consigning myself to feeling. My curiosity and interest in learning and understanding drew me to the refuge of my thinking mind and imagination. I can tell you that living at distance and living conceptually don’t render a good life.

I am only now beginning to know the lightness of Being which ensues from directly experiencing my sentience—the ups and the downs. I am only now knowing the life giving beauty of creativity. Only now perceiving Enchantment’s delight. Only now being disciplined enough to let go of dispiriting and disheartening habits of thought and action. Only now disciplining myself to creative ends.

How do we do this?

It’s giving ourselves over to magnificent music or getting lost in the myriad flavors and warmth of a meal, coffee or a glass of wine… It’s feeling the wind tousling our hair; basking in a lover’s touch, or feeling heartened in seeing the light in another’s eyes… It’s watching the way happy people move as they go about their day…, and seeing the angle of falling rain, and becoming entranced by the concentric circles forming in puddles…

Get out of the city. Go to the park. Nature is so compelling, so solicitous of our what’s real in us…

Reading is no substitute for direct sensory experience. At their best, words inspire and rouse us to come to our senses. Here are a few such words by poet William Stafford: Got up on a cool morning. Leaned out a window.No cloud, no wind. Air that flowers heldfor awhile. Some dove somewhere.

​Many cars have GPS. You know how they work: they chart a course from our current locations to our destinations. They continuously calculate the relationship between our here and now and our desired there and then—and re-choreograph our movement when we veer off. We do this in our lives too. I’m curious whether the places we seem bent on going are actually the places we imagine them to be? I’m curious too about being goal directed by things out there versus meeting our deeper needs. Just wondering…

​GPS records our starting points. It remembers. No matter our present situations or seemingly similar destinations—because each of us have differing points of origin—we can never compare our experience, positions nor degrees of progress with others. What do we need in order to let go such comparisons? I wonder…

…The safest and easiest way to drive at speed through sharp or broadly sweeping curves requires fixing our sight on a moving point. Where we place this moving point depends on:​1) which side of the road’s centerline we drive on,2) whether we’re on a multi-lane road,3) whether the curve in front of us bends to our right or left.

In North America we drive to the right of the road’s centerline. Here on a road having one lane in each direction approaching a right bending curve, we need look to the painted line near the right edge of the road in front of us. We must fix our sight on a point on this painted line as far into the curve as we can see—and continue moving this point into and around and through the curve—and beyond as the road straightens.

Were we to look elsewhere instead, our systems would take us there. If we become aware of this change in course we would need to exert additional force to again move in our desired direction. Sometimes we right ourselves. Sometimes no.

As we coordinate our systems of attention and intent (navigating curves elegantly in our own ways) by seeing that moving point in front of us—and connect these with our mind, body and environment, we more graciously approach the contours our journeys bring—whose changing conditions we only discover by approaching and moving into and through them. In our connecting we join larger forces informing our motion, applications of effort and creativity.

​Boxing Day is celebrated the day after Christmas in nine countries and recognized in seventeen others. The story goes that Boxing Day originated in England in the Middle Ages. Masters gave Christmas Boxes to their servants the day after Christmas for they, the servants, had worked on Christmas. The servants then went on holiday taking their Boxes to their families. So too, at some point, alms Boxes turned up in local parishes where monies were collected and given to the poor on the day following Christmas. This practice became part of Boxing Day. In our times this day is celebrated by giving gifts to tradesmen, mail carriers, doormen, porters and others in service.

Though my country doesn’t celebrate Boxing Day the gesture and sentiments touch me deeply: An echo of my British ancestry perhaps. In my own life the gifts I give those working in the laundry, in the shoe repair, to the receptionist at the medical office, the checker at the market, and so on always gives me the greatest pleasure and joy—more so than other giving.

In our world those with advantage are borne on the backs of the less advantaged: Those having less expend their energies laboring for and enabling those with more. Lower class youth fight and die in wars benefitting the higher classes. In nature greater trees crowd out lesser ones. And so it goes ad infinitum in all kingdoms: animal, mineral, vegetable and fungi.

Life lives on Life! This is an integral design element of our Cosmos. Experiencing pressures and conflicts are inescapable artifacts of our Being—of living. Our Cosmos is annihilation and creation-based: it expands and contracts: Forces and countervailing forces form our basic Cosmic architecture. We experience the high and low pressures of these forces in a myriad forms constantly: Stress and pressure are inherent in living. Angst and suffering are not.

Angst and suffering issue from us elevating the status and value of one Life form above another—from elevating aspects of ourselves above others. We ourselves create angst and suffering. They are after-market add-ons. They are distinct from Cosmic design. They are a consequence of us failing to see into the Mystery’s realities. Yet nothing is hidden from us. Nothing.

My point is not about out there though. Rather, we’ve judged parts of our own selves as less worthy, less beautiful, less correct or relevant than other parts. We’ve given them the cold shoulder—we’ve tried to annihilate them. Yet we fancy others bits. Judging them better. Worthy. We like these things about ourselves. We expand them all the while forgetting they are borne by the disliked parts doing the heavy lifting.

Some say hierarchy is the problem. To me, hierarchy is structural. Its isn’t the problem. Rather, the rub lies in our failure to Love Life—the Whole of it—within ourselves—and the entirety of it out there. We love only the forces of the lovely. To remove angst and suffering we need also to express the love of kindness, compassion, generosity and graciousness within ourselves, and with others. We need to do so while in the throes of the forces of difficulty.

Our failing to Love comes from our failing to see into the Mystery. Our failing to see comes from failing to Love. A cyclic thing.

As Bert Hellinger ended one of his classes saying “May you know joy irrespective of circumstance.” I wondered how the hell ya do that. Now nearly twenty years later I’m getting purchase on these abilities. There are people who’ve finished their lives—completed their ‘karma’. I’m not one of them: I do my work. I bring what comes. Thus my blogging arc on Happiness and joy.

In this series I’ve riffed on with inherently unstable writings—not for me, but for some there’s dissonance in what I write: I don’t mean not agreeing politically for I don’t give a rip about politics. We know that a state’s policies are insulated from its politics: policies continue on irrespective of who’s in office. We know too that political rhetoric is discordant and distracts us from doing what’s necessary. From seeking contexts from which change arises. Solutions are not in found political action.

The necessary changes we seek are those within ourselves—those urging us to think, feel and act differently. To be aware. Clear. To be relaxed and powerfully resolute while flexing and letting go of what we need leave behind. To go where we must to go. To do what we need to do. To be ourselves irrespective.

Dr. Milton H. Erickson said something to the effect that we need to attend to joy for life brings the other things. Our systems require the buoyancy of joy and happiness. We need to really want this buoyancy. This joy. We’ve become inured to pedestrian existences: We have forgotten to remember that we are the chefs at the French Laundry--yet living out macaroni and cheese lives.

We need to believe Happiness is possible for ourselves. We need to know what to do to capture joy and Happinesses’s attention. We need to understand how to do these things. Experiencing Happiness in our bodies reifies its value, its necessity. Though we have active imaginations susceptible to suggestion, direct sensory experience is called for—of necessity for we are sentient beings.

The cacophony of the world is intensifying, growing louder—becoming more discordant. More than ever we need mental and emotional composure—harmony. Internal consonance. We must sit fully and easily in our bodies while feeling vital, relaxed, peaceful, clear—powerful.

For this we need the leverage of Happiness. We need flirtations of joy and encounters with humor--for in their resonance, they and we, form formable partnerships of equanimity. This is an ‘on the ground’ thing inside ourselves. This is the difference that makes the difference. Nothing changes out there until things change on the inside. This requires disciplined doing. We can’t think our way through and into the leverage necessary to carry us onward in these times.

Want to change the—your—world? There are things to do immediately. Of course we will fail. Failure is but feedback. Discovery lies in here. Make these discoveries. Then do things differently. As these things become practiced pieces of our repertoire Happiness expands enabling us to do more out there—if that’s your bent.

1) Say what you mean.2) Mean what you say.3) Do what you say you will do.4) Say what is so for you, when it is so, without blame or judgement.5) Do the things you love to do.

Power… our misconception of it… humility… our misunderstanding of it… and modesty—false modesty… painting by the numbers… coloring within the lines… following the party-line… believing tall poppies are cut down first… gradations of coercion and associated fears… our intense silent resistances… our pettinesses… emotional protestations… our exuberant concurring opinions… we, ourselves, allowing our attentions to be co-opted by the news—and—us allowing ourselves the folly of swinging between states of lassitude and any- and everything else except that which makes the difference… When is enough enough?

America’s plentitude of shootings are but the ricochet of each of us individually, within ourselves, repeatedly shooting ourselves in our own feet.

What have we done? what are we doing to ourselves in breathing in and out cultural strictures wrought from a worldview born of and borne on grand misunderstanding, ignorance and agendas not our own…

Unwitting adherents we have been to conventions taught by wardens out there possessing religious, philosophical, social and political leverage…Leverage we ourselves surrendered.

Acts of terror out there are but the echo of our internalized wardens executing lock-down orders within.

Does it not seem that humanity’s story of all things no longer serves? Here’s an interruption to the story-line:

There is no I and Thou. There is no we and they, nor us and them. There is no subject/object. There is no God/Creation separation. There was no ‘fall from grace’. We’ve not forgotten what came before nor what follows. Dualism is a concept. An idea. A model expressed in a myriad disciplines and religions traditions. It is itself an agenda driven rational plausibility based on misunderstanding which has no currency beyond a peculiar transient moment in history—one for which we must suspend our disbelief to abide. It is a folly-bound sleight of mouth. It lives on providing illusory benefit to the few while offering others of us the ostensible shelter of our complacency.

Are not the shootings and terror sufficient to fissure the ramparts of our hearts and thus ready ourselves to take the Mystery’s hand?

At what cost is our adherence to our thought wardens and estrangement? Were we honest the answer we must give is “Everything!”

Here’s the “Everything”: Our existential and ontological inheritance is being consorts to the Mystery! Yet we deny ourselves. We falsely believe we are estranged from Her. We are not! We are expressions of the Mystery and possess the requisite capacities to interrelate, dance and co-create each moment of our lives with Her. To create worlds differently than what we’ve known. But we haven’t yet: We remain in the Gordian knot of our individual and collective stories—all the while pretending we have no sword.

Have you had the delight of witnessing a two year old tell their mother “You’re not the boss of me!”? If so, you are indeed privileged. There is a knowing inside each of us that we are sovereign. Though we are irrevocable members of our ancestries and families of origin—all of our other belongings, e.g., marriages, employments, etc., are voluntary. Though we belong, we remain particular and individual—autonomous. We are neither owned by anyone nor are we another’s possession. We subordinate to no one. No form of life is superior to nor inferior to another. We stand sovereign though there exists ethnic, religious, familial, commercial, national and personal mores bent on telling us differently. Bent on treating us as subjects. And, we’ve internalized their stories.​Though we’re distant from this deepest knowing, no one is the boss of us. This reality and our knowing of it predates our upbringings and the training we’ve undergone in the world’s paradoxical hopes of getting us to forget what we know. To forget what and who we are. In our forgetting we rally-on, oblivious and unawares being good representatives and good embodiments of our learned stories—believing that the identities others have ascribed, or those we’ve made for ourselves, are actually who we are. They are not. Inasmuch, we falsely believe we know ourselves. The majority of us do not know who or what we are—nor do most of us believing that we know, actually know! This is spoiler alert #1.

The thing is we cannot know ourselves. We are an expression of the unknowable Mystery. Yet we can adjust our thinking, actions and expressive motion for our lives to become increasingly more resonant and reflective of the numinous Beings—the drops of the Mystery’s Universal Intelligence that we are. Paradoxically, we do this by learning what we can of ourselves through our direct sensory experience…and by being changed in the process.

In recent posts I’ve pointed to the non-negotiable geographies of ourselves and the importance of identifying and defending them. Like it or not, we are most aware of our non-negotiable areas when they’ve been breached. In such moments, we so want a good life for ourselves and feel most distant from it. Whether we use these words or not, we want a relaxed equanimity for ourselves—a safe, responsive, vitally alive and creatively expressive peacefulness within our skin—a good life.

Nowadays our world’s hegemony does little to mask the horrors it perpetrates in service to its ends. We do not go a day without seeing and hearing reports of terrorizing circumstances that others experience. Many of us fear such visitations.

Spoiler alert #2: The greatest perpetration of terror is not taking place out there in the world’s lovely cities nor in the geopolitically interesting corners of our world—Rather—the greatest terror is being perpetrated within ourselves by ourselves and is being rained down upon ourselves in each and every moment that we deny and refuse to be ourselves—in each and every moment that we deny and refuse to creatively express the promises we are here to fulfill—in each and every moment we that we deny and refuse to think and act graciously, kindly, compassionately and generously—and in each and every moment that we deny and refuse to claim our prodigious personal power—and every time we refuse to claim and defend what is non-negotiable within ourselves.

Letting go is itself a great power. It is time now, to acquire this power: It is right now, to let go of the personal arrogance of us thinking that we are small and inconsequential; to let go of arrogantly buoying the falsity of low self-esteem and self-worth; to let go of arrogantly denying our individual dignity, innocence, beauty, creative capacities and our robust strengths and power—and our capacities for clarity———and, for refusing to claim our unflinching capacities to Love.

I write not of politics but rather of Love. Happiness need no longer elude us. Claiming our personal power is a one of our happiness makers.

​“Know thyself” is the most famous utterance of Priestess Pythia, the Oracle of Delphi. When the old Greeks got overly wrought in the morass of their thoughts clarity was difficult to achieve. Voila`! the Priestess saves the day for she liaised with the Mystery and was damned good at it.

​Pythia spoke the languages of the Goddesses, Gods and mortals of course. Her role was clear: to provide a human voice—a native tongue articulation to better enable the Mystery to capture human attention, engagement and creative self-expression. Though we are absent Pythia’s oracular voice today, the Mystery is still bent on garnering our attentions. As the great Irish poet philosopher John O’Donohue said “The Mystery won’t leave us alone.” Her intent is compliance: Ours. We are to fulfill the promises of our lives for Life requires an exchange. We’re to render our part in our own sovereign ways of course. The Mystery is persistent. But she won’t beg. Ante your part or live the consequences of an unfulfilled existence. Curiously, the majority remains oblivious to her. Nonetheless…

Whether we’re responsive to her Her or not, deep down we know we are well served to acquire self knowledge: part of this is identifying the topographies of ourselves— that ground within us that the forces of the Mystery have crafted and rendered non-negotiable. Sovereign. Inviolate. “Keep your hands off buddy! You won’t talk to me this way!” And get this: we, ourselves, did not choose which parts of us are not to be trespassed, sullied or messed with. We did not choose which lines in the sands of ourselves are not to be crossed. Its a “we were born this way thing”. The forces of the Mystery marked us, as all Life, as sacred.

One of our life tasks is to identify our non-negotiable ground. Then we are to defend these with Grace—and if necessary, with all requisite fierceness—but only this. There is to be no unnecessary force. Do no unnecessary harm. Do not be polite. Do not be rude. Stand in the Grace of your personal power and tend to your sovereign integrity. Its not a good/bad, right/wrong thing. Rather, there are actions and behaviors that are a fit for us and those that are not. Some people are a fit, some not.

Once we’ve identified our inviolate areas—those requiring our relaxed vigilant attention—we become clear on sentiments and actions expressed by others—on areas of our common ground—which, though ungracious, we can let slide. Let go of. Ignore. Drop. Turn the other cheek. For that other person needs in these moments your graciousness. Your kindness. Your generosity. Your compassion.

Typically we are unaware of our non-negotiable terrain. So too we are ignorant of the places where we can be honestly gracious and caring. Too often our non-negotiable aspects enter our awareness as they are being, or just after having been violated. Then, because we’ve been brought up to be nice we say nothing. Its only later, long after the sovereign territories of ourselves have been breached, overrun and occupied—long after being beleaguered and besieged—long after we’ve sheltered ourselves in our ostensible comfort zones which are too small for us—we yet say nothing. For we are inured to the ongoing battering of the rams on our facades.

Worry not. Should we not take well care. For in the Mystery’s largesse She ups Her ante rendering larger and larger breaches until we redeploy our attentions and take necessary action—those of preserving and restoring the vestiges of our shattered integrities.

​I sometimes wonder whether impediments to being ourselves, creative self-expression and choosing happiness ensue from our forgetting to identify and defend those terms of their lives that are non-negotiable, or should be: areas against which pop psychology informs that we must have boundaries and enforce them. Take for example a child speaking abusively to her or his parent: The parent need respond something to the effect: “Enough!! I love you!, and you will never speak to me in this manner again! Ever! Do you understand me? Never!

Saying these things are most effective when the parent is strong, and her or his voice and body language match the volume and intensity of the child’s speech, without the parent, her- or himself, being angry. Yet saying these things is a must. She or he need then enforce future breaches by imposing sanctions that are meaningful to the child. We need be loving, yet firm and fair in our resolve to honor ourselves and be treated properly. This is about self-love!

It is our own individual responsibility to monitor how others treat us. Each of us are autonomous and sovereign beings whether we appreciate this or not--whether our cultural mores reflect this. In the absence of us defending what we deem as non-negotiable, the defending of our dignity, and ensuring that we are treated respectfully, we are, in effect, endorsing, underwriting and normalizing the untenable diminishment of ourselves and our lives. We are then complicit in undermining our integrity and dashing the promise of being ourselves. In this we lower the probabilities of fulfilling the promise of our creative self-expression. We prevent ourselves from having a good life.

I’m a proponent of human decency—of being gracious, compassionate, kind and generous. Expressing these things gives rise to more ease and effectiveness in navigating life’s currents: they reflect our essential ennobling spiritual natures. We need be genuine in this—honest, aligned, congruent—or we are indecent—doing unnecessary harm to ourselves and others.

Pretense is trite and cheap. Graciousness, compassion, kindness, and being generous are not forms of politenesses. Rather, they are expressions of love. Politeness itself is an affront. An obscene one—sullying everyone. We see through such ruses though we pretend otherwise. Politeness never masks indifference, upset or other agendas.

I invite you to deplore and eschew rudeness too. Yet standing up for ourselves is never rude! Standing up for ourselves is imperative—without it no self remains. Standing up for ourselves by honoring what is non-negotiable for us—this is essential to our wholeness, our wellness. Attending to the stature of our dignity is our responsibility alone.

Of course be gracious to the fullest extent possible yet never at the expense of our own self-respect and personal dignity. There are times when the most decent and respectful thing we can do is clearly and powerfully interrupt and stop another when their speech or actions diminish, denigrate or demean us. Some circumstances warrant an unambiguous emphatic “Fuck you!” punctuated by walking away! And staying away if necessary. A “Fuck you” can be literally or metaphorically delivered depending on need. Yet avoid unnecessary harm at all costs.

Proviso: Our intent needs to be clear within ourselves: we are saying these strong things to disrupt and stop another’s unwanted and untoward behavior; it is neither our place nor role to diminish another person. We are to stop their behavior toward us! Nothing more. Nothing less. If our intent is aligned the other can hear and receive our message. If our intent is to indict, punish and diminish the person we only worsen our circumstance and their’s. We must clearly know our intent as it is the difference that makes the difference.

Wisdom holds “If you step on my tail, I will bite you.” Our job is to be powerful, strong and loving in our autonomous sovereignty as we relate well with others.

Caveat: It’s bad form to say “Fuck you” to a spouse or lover, close friend or colleague unless we require an inordinate amount of leverage to get ourselves to leave the relationship. Never harm unnecessarily.